The Correspondence of Thomas Jefferson

By Subject

MALTHUS / ON POLITICAL ECONOMY

I have to acknowledge the receipt of your obliging letter, and with
it, of two very interesting volumes on Political Economy. These found
me engaged in giving the leisure moments I rarely find, to the perusal
of Malthus' work on population, a work of sound logic, in which some
of the opinions of Adam Smith, as well as of the economists, are ably
examined.

The differences of circumstance between this and the old countries
of. Europe, furnish differences of fact whereon to reason, in
questions of political economy, and will consequently produce
sometimes a difference of result. There, for instance, the quantity of
food is fixed, or increasing in a slow and only arithmetical ratio,
and the proportion is limited by the same ratio. Supernumerary births
consequently add only to your mortality. Here the immense extent of
uncultivated and fertile lands enables every one who will labor, to
marry young, and to raise a family of any size. Our food, then, may
increase geometrically with our laborers, and our births, however
multiplied, become effective. Again, there the best distribution of
labor is supposed to be that which places the manufacturing hands
alongside the agricultural; so that the one part shall feed both, and
the other part furnish, both with clothes and other comforts. Would
that be best here? Egoism and first appearances say yes. Or would it
be better that all our laborers should be employed in agriculture? In
this case a double or treble portion of fertile lands would be brought
into culture; a double or treble creation of food be produced, and its
surplus go to nourish the now perishing births of Europe, who in
return would manufacture and send us in exchange our clothes and other
comforts. Morality listens to this, and so invariably do the laws of
nature create our duties and interests, that when they seem to be at
variance, we ought to suspect some fallacy in our reasonings. In
solving this question, too, we should allow its just weight to the
moral and physical preference of the agricultural, over the
manufacturing, man. My occupations permit me only to ask questions.
They deny me the time, if I had the information, to answer them.
Perhaps, as worthy the attention of the author of the
Traite' d'Economie Politique, I shall find them answered in
that work. If they are not, the reason will have been that you wrote
for Europe; while I shall have asked them because I think for America.